The Ultimate Round Robin Knowledge Base for Sales Teams

Round Robin Knowledge Base > Lead assignment

Lead assignment

Lead assignment is a critical process for most sales organizations. It's also frequently one of the most common use cases for round robin assignment because response time is so important.

When to use round robin for lead assignment

Here are some important considerations when deciding if round robin lead assignment is right for your team:

• Do you have a team of reps (usually BDRs) dedicated to qualification?
  If so, then it makes sense to use a round robin process to assign inbound leads to members of that team for qualification.
• Do you have strict territory rules?
  If your territory rules designate a single owner for any inbound lead (e.g. every account from the 90210 zipcode goes to Susan), then you're not really looking for a round robin process. Consider an automated lead routing process instead.
• How important is response time to your business?
  There is a lot of research out there showing that response time is critical with inbound leads. Round robin lead assignment can often speed this process up and reduce you team's average response time.

Implementing round robin lead assignment

Start by documenting the process you want to use; try to keep it as simple as possible. Remember to take into account the fact that inbound leads can be messy. You'll often get incomplete contact information. Make sure to work with your marketing team to ensure that you're capturing necessary information via your marketing automation platform. Once you're capturing the right info, you'll most likely still need to do  lead-to-account matching to make sure you get the lead to the right rep.

Once you've done lead-to-account matching, you still need to make sure that you're routing the lead to an appropriate rep based on your territories, market segments, rules of engagement, etc. Since you may be dealing with a higher volume of inbound leads than other parts of your sales funnel, you'll most likely want to automate the round robin assignment process.

Finally, remember that a major goal of using round robin for inbound leads is to improve response time. You may want to implement some advanced round robin optimizations to ensure that you're doing that.